Aid to Hamas??

Diplomacy: President Obama sat for a White House photo op with the Palestinian Authority’s leader and then announced a $400 million aid package for the West Bank and Gaza. What’s wrong with this picture?

The president seemed to go out of his way this week to please his latest guest, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, in a way he didn’t when Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came calling last month.

Why is the White house providing $400 Million in aid to a terrorist regime?

Why the U.S. should be supporting a regime that so far this year has fired 370 lethal rockets into Israel, that still refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and that has made a cottage industry of teaching children to hate is beyond us.

Extra cash for the same people who danced in the streets on 9/11 will just free up more resources for new terror and mayhem against the Jewish state. Some $10 billion has been spent globally in the last decade on Palestine, and places like Gaza remain as miserably pro-terrorist as ever.

If the plan is to buy off Gazans so they’ll vote for non-terrorists, it’s hard to see how this would work. Hamas could refuse to let the U.S. build the schools, just as the group refused aid from Israel-inspected ships that ran the Gaza blockade. These aren’t people who help themselves.

Nor can such aid ever help them as long as they remain committed to Israel’s destruction. President Obama’s aid offer was both expensive and naive.